COVID-19 has led to some changes for companies and none has been more significant than the shift to remote working. Although workplaces have now reopened, large sections of the workforce are now working permanently from home or have adopted a hybrid working pattern.
Hybrid working is proving to be an especially popular working model as it gives employees greater flexibility paired with the support and camaraderie that they can benefit from when they come into the office. With this shift in attitudes in mind, companies are left trying to work out how they can balance their teams in the office with those employees who are now working remotely.
Some businesses have embraced the remote working model to an even greater degree and are taking on team members who live all over the world. A company’s workforce no longer even needs to live within the same time zone thanks to cutting-edge technologies.
Nevertheless, hybrid and remote working simply cannot function without the right software tools, so which are the best ones to implement for your teams in 2022?
Here, we’ve taken a good look at some of the top-performing tools that your remote and hybrid teams are sure to find useful and beneficial this year. Each of the five tools that we have recommended covers one of the key elements that present challenges to this way of working.
Weekdone – Promoting Better Collaboration
Collaboration on projects is one of the first issues that teams encounter when there are remote and hybrid workers. Working together on tasks is easy when every team member is in the office at the same time, but when some individuals are at home, or even elsewhere in the world, how can you plan tasks effectively, share updates, or communicate properly?
Weekdone is a highly efficient tool that allows hybrid and remote teams to effectively plan tasks and projects no matter where they are in the world. Not only does this go-to tool offer the ability to share updates and get vital information when it’s needed most, but it even allows the functionality to praise co-workers when they complete a task well.
Perfect for marketing, design, and development teams, Weekdone leverages asynchronous communication and pairs it with weekly planning features and gamified reward systems that are hard to beat.
Lumeer – Enabling Better Project Management
Managing projects is no mean feat even when all members of the team are in the same place at the same time, so finding a tool that simplifies workflow digitalisation and automation is vital when it comes to managing hybrid teams.
Lumeer is a flexible and collaborative project and team management tool that improves transparency and gives ad-hoc insights and reporting about what to complete next, why it’s so important, and how it can be done.
Clients, tasks, features, projects, invoices, budgets, inventory, and expenses can all be connected in one space, introducing agile collaboration for teams wherever they’re located.
Skype – Improving Communication
Communication can all too easily fail when team members are scattered around the country or the globe. Finding efficient and effective ways for everyone working on a project or task to communicate with each other at the same time couldn’t be more important and this is something that Skype excels at.
Skype offers the benefit of either live chatting software or video calling, with the possibility of creating enormous group chats with as many as six hundred participants or group calls that can involve as many as fifty workers from either a smartphone or desktop PC.
Even better, the software is completely free and can be used anywhere that there is a reliable Wi-fi connection. As an added bonus, Skype chats are fully end-to-end encrypted so every message is entirely secure – something that businesses should take very seriously.
Wimi – Easy File Sharing
Whether you need to share documents with other team members who are working from home or whether you need to collaborate on a single document and need other team members to see additions, corrections, and alterations that have been made, Wimi is the easy file sharing tool that modern businesses need.
Providing online file storage and file sharing that can be accessed from all computers, Wimi synchronises your information and makes it available whenever it is needed from any device that offers internet access. You can create a customised and secure file-sharing workspace so you can edit and preview most types of file format, and you have the functionality to manage access rights so collaboration with clients, external partners, and team members is a breeze.
In cases where files are too large to be emailed, Wimi even allows you to send a download link to eliminate the sharing problem.
Pesto – Creating A Virtual Office Environment
Although it isn’t possible to create an exact replica of the office environment in the comfort of an employee’s own home, Pesto does its best to simulate the experience. This open-beta free virtual office software allows users to customise their own avatar so they can showcase their own personalities and put faces to their voices.
This handy tool makes it a breeze to start chatting instantly to work colleagues, obtain status updates, check-in quickly, and get clarification for confusing tasks.
Pesto also allows meetings to be set up with screen sharing and video options, and there are exciting features like lofi rooms in which listening to music with teammates is possible, spatial rooms that allow users to hop into conversations by walking around the map, and even trivia rooms where team socials can be held.
Distance Doesn’t Have To Determine Work Patterns
It’s becoming clear that hybrid and remote working is the way of the future, and that means that flexibility is going to become increasingly important for all types of business.
Fortunately, these tools that we have recommended here allow remote and hybrid teams to remain connected, productive, and collaborative, bringing the office to everyone, no matter where they may be located in the world.
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